"We are the only country in history that ever deliberately changed its ethnic makeup, and history has few examples of 'diversity' creating a stable society." - Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Is Barack Obama a faux African-American?

Obama is constantly compared to Tiger Woods. But he differs in two ways. First, his list of accomplishments in his chosen profession a lot shorter than the golfer's. And, second, Woods rejected Nike's suggestion that he identify himself as solely black to maximize his marketability in America because he did not want to reject his mother and more distant non-black ancestors. Woods declared himself " Caublinasian," his childhood term for his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestry.

In contrast, like Oscar-winner Halle Berry, Obama identifies as black although that requires symbolically disowning his white mother and maternal grandparents — despite the fact that they did far more for him than the Kenyan father who abandoned him when he was two.

Obama writes: "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."

The brutal truth: Obama is a "wigger." He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless. He has no ancestors who were slaves in the U.S. Moreover, his upbringing by his white mother and Indonesian stepfather in Indonesia and by his white grandparents in Hawaii, where mixed-race children are close to the norm, was almost wholly divorced from African-American life … except for what he could see and aspire to on TV.

Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans. (Here are photos of Obama with Jesse Jackson and with the rapper Ludacris, both of whom have conventional West African features.)